During surgery, it sometimes happens that a surgeon has to reach a region to be operated upon that is located underneath an internal organ of a patient. In such cases, it is common in the art of surgery to anchor or retract the organ, or other internal soft body tissues, using suture anchor while performing the medical procedure. An approach often employed during traditional surgical procedures is by securing a suture anchor in a previously prepared borehole in a rigid structure such as an adjacent bone. A suture may then be attached to the anchor to secure the soft tissue in place. U.S. Patent Application No. 2005/055052 to Lombardo et al. describes a knotless suture anchor and method for insertion into tissue, thereby allowing one to reversibly secure soft tissue without tying a knot. U.S. Patent Application No. 2008/0009904 to Bourque et al. also describes a soft tissue fixation device that is used in the repair of soft tissue such as ligaments and tendons by insertion of the anchor into bone followed by attachment of sutures to the bone. These approaches, however, are not suitable for laparoscopic surgeries as no such adjacent rigid structure are conveniently accessible.
Laparoscopic surgery is a modern surgical technique in which operations in the abdomen are performed through small incisions (usually 0.5-1.5 cm) that are much less invasive than the larger incisions needed in traditional surgical procedures. During laparoscopic surgery, more traditional tools such as those described above may either not be used for lack of space or simply because they do not fit within a laparoscopic port. Instead, in order to fix or retract organs, laparoscopic surgeons use suture threads that are inserted at a first site, for example through an abdominal wall, looped and wound around a target organ and reinserted at the first site. The suture thread is then pulled to retract the target organ. Such an operation must be repeated multiple times for every organ in need of retracting, thereby increasing the time of the often-delicate procedures. Such a method of retracting is depicted in FIG. 1.
Laparoscopic surgery is performed through a limited number of laparoscopic ports. These ports, which are points of entry into the abdomen, have to be used efficiently during the surgical procedure. U.S. Patent Application No. 2005/0234512 to Nakao describes an endoscopic anchoring device assembly. The device comprises a series of anchor that may be delivered inside the patient and deployed into a target tissue, the device being operated by the surgeon extracorporeally through a pushing operation. However, this endoscopic anchoring device can only deliver and deploy anchors from the device itself, from the point of entry in the abdomen. Although it is now currently used in laparoscopic surgery, there would be no incentive to do so as either one less laparoscopic port would be available for other tools or one more laparoscopic port would be necessary.
Although not desirable, adding one extra laparoscopic port is however sometimes required since no alternatives currently exists. For example, to retract solid organs such as liver, specific dedicated retracting tools are used. Using the additional laparoscopic port nevertheless defeats the purpose of the laparoscopic surgery, which is to use as few ports and be as little intrusive as possible.
The devices discussed above display noticeable shortcomings in that they either may not be anchored adequately inside the abdominal cavity, use a laparoscopic port that could otherwise be used for other purposes, or do not allow multiple organs to be retracted in a time efficient manner. There is therefore a clear need for a better retracting tool adapted to laparoscopic surgery.